What Happened to FAQ Rich Results (and Why You Should Keep the FAQ Page)

October 2, 2026

An abnormal lab value used to get flagged in the chart with a red marker, something that pulled your eye the moment you opened the patient’s record.

Then an EHR update quietly retires that flag for certain values and folds them back into the plain results list.

The number is exactly as true as it was the day before. You just have to read the results now instead of letting the highlight do it for you.

Google did something similar to FAQ pages in August 2023. Plenty of practices drew the wrong conclusion from it.

What actually changed

For years, if your website had a page answering questions like “do you accept Medicare” or “what should I expect at my first visit,” Google could pull those questions and answers straight into the search results as an expandable list that sat right under your listing and sometimes ate half the screen.

That expanded display is a FAQ rich result. It came from a piece of structured data called FAQPage schema, a bit of code that tells Google, in so many words, these are questions and these are their answers.

In August 2023, Google restricted that expanded display to “well-known, authoritative government and health websites.”

A five-physician family practice in Ohio doesn’t qualify. Neither does a dermatology group, an OBGYN office, or a solo internist three years into private practice.

The schema still works. Google still reads it.

What’s gone, for essentially every independent practice site, is the oversized display in the results, the part that used to make your listing visibly bigger than the practice next door.

Some practices heard about the change, or just noticed their listings had shrunk, and decided the FAQ page wasn’t worth maintaining anymore.

That’s the part worth correcting.

The rich result and the page were never the same thing

The rich result was a display feature, a way for Google to show more of your content on the results page without the patient clicking through. Useful while you had it.

But the page itself exists for a different reason. Patients arrive at a practice website with three questions they need answered before they’ll pick up the phone.

Do you take my insurance. Usually the first thing a prospective patient searches for after finding your name, and a website that never says one way or the other is the single most common reason a call never happens.

Do you have an opening. Especially for a practice that isn’t taking new patients right now, or one with a known wait for a specific service.

Silence here reads as “assume the worst” to many people, and they go to the next name on the list.

Is this the right kind of doctor for my problem. A patient searching “heavy periods every month” doesn’t necessarily know whether that belongs to a gynecologist, an endocrinologist, or a primary care visit.

A well-built FAQ answers that in plain language before the patient ever calls to ask.

All of that depended on the answers existing, in writing, on a page a patient could find, and none of it ever depended on the expandable box in Google’s results.

The page still does exactly what it did in 2022. It just doesn’t get the big display anymore.

The page you kept is now feeding something new

There’s a second reason to keep the FAQ page current, and it has nothing to do with how Google’s results page looks.

AI assistants, the kind a patient might ask directly (“does Dr. Alvarez’s office in Marietta take Aetna”), read the actual text of the page, the plain-language question and the plain-language answer sitting next to it, and they use it as a source when they compose a response.

A page that clearly states your insurance panels, your new-patient policy, and the conditions you treat is legible to a generative answer the same way it’s legible to a patient skimming with their thumb.

A page that never got built, or that hasn’t been touched since the practice opened, has nothing in it to pull from.

The incentive underneath is the same as it always was. Say the true, specific thing patients need to know, in a form that’s easy to find and easy to lift.

What belongs on the page now

The FAQ pages that still earn their keep share a few habits:

• Use the questions patients actually ask. Somebody types “do you see patients without a referral” at nine at night. Nobody types “what makes us different.”
• Specific answers. “We accept most major insurance plans” tells a patient nothing. Name the plans, or name the two or three you don’t take.
• Update it when the facts change. A new-patient policy that flipped six months ago and never made it onto the page is actively misleading someone right now.
• Keep the schema markup even without the rich result. It costs nothing, and it’s the same structure that helps a machine reader parse the page correctly.

Read your FAQ page like a patient who hasn’t called yet

The oversized search result was a nice bonus while it lasted. Pull the page up anyway and read it as if you were deciding whether to dial.

Does it say, in plain terms, what insurance you take, whether you’re accepting new patients right now, and what conditions or concerns bring people through your door.

If any of those three answers is missing, vague, or out of date, that’s the fix.

Photograph: Miriam Alonso / Pexels